Aviation Videos.

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
There was a Lancaster passenger version, the Lancastrian.

44fc24918191f08a899692341abd259a.jpg
 

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
Somebody put this pix of an Avro Lincoln bomber on a shipping and history site I visit. It's such a good pix I thought it might be appreciated here. It's in Australian colours (RAAF) and the location is Japan in 1947.
I'm told the Lincoln was basically an upgraded Lancaster, fitted with Rolls Royce Griffin engines. It was even converted for passenger carrying for a while !!!! (Wow that must have been noisy.)

View attachment 8677
The Lincoln was still Merlin-powered*.

Mr Chadwick's next step along that path, the Shackleton, was Griffon-driven, being a bit more draggy with stuff sicking out everywhere and needing a bit more 'go'..

1434601811234.jpg


The Shackleton remains one of the nicest looking and probably the nicest sounding of all aircraft.

And, oddly, it got better looking as time went on and the modifications appeared.



* There were other engines in Lincolns, for various experimental purposes, and the cowlings do look a bit 'Griffon', but the standard was still a Merlin fitting.
 

BobClay

Well-Known Forumite
I remember seeing an Horizon program about a famous one that disappeared over the Andes and was found decades later emerging from the base of a glacier. Apparently they were using dead reckoning to calculate their position, but hadn't counted on the 'Jetstream' which meant when they decided to lose altitude thinking they'd crossed the Andes, they flew straight into a mountain and were buried in snow and ice, hence the searches never found them. :(

There's a famous mystery about that flight, enigmatic Morse messages were heard from the aircraft.
 
Last edited:

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
I remember seeing an Horizon program about a famous one that disappeared over the Andes and was found decades later emerging from the base of a glacier. Apparently they were using dead reckoning to calculate their position, but hadn't counted on the 'Jetstream' which meant when they decided to lose altitude thinking they'd crossed the Andes, they flew straight into a mountain and were buried in snow and ice, hence the searches never found them. :(

There's a famous mystery about that flight, enigmatic Morse messages were heard from the aircraft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_BSAA_Avro_Lancastrian_Star_Dust_accident
 

BobClay

Well-Known Forumite
These days we take navigation for granted, what with all the aids from Omega, Loran, Decca, the old SatNav system, GPS and several other rather more military setups. But in those days, if you couldn't see the Sun, or stars, or ground, it was dead reckoning. (Also known as 'guesswork.') :o
 
Last edited:

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
These days we take navigation for granted, what with all the aids from Omega, Loran, Decca, the old SatNav system, GPS and several other rather more military setups. But in those days, if you couldn't see the Sun, or stars, or ground, it was dead reckoning. (Also known as 'guesswork.') :o
People still make mistakes, landing at the wrong airport is not unknown - and mistaking adjacent motorway lights for runways...

In the 80s, there was a display at the RAF, one of the aircraft involved was a US Air Force C-135 (707 variant). His 'display' was conducted at some considerable distance east from Beaconside, barely visible to the crowd. It was denied at the time, but there was a suspicion that he had seen the runway pattern at Hixon and assumed he was there - and maybe nobody mentioned that Stafford had no runways..?

People even have mistaken invasions - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53034930
 

BobClay

Well-Known Forumite
In 1973 I joined a Maersk ore carrier in Vancouver loading grain for Dairen in China .. (a very different China from what you see today. Mao was still running the show at that time.) A few days after we left Vancouver we entered dense fog. The North Pacific is notorious for this due to cold water coming down through the Bering Strait. We had this fog throughout the entire passage across the Pacific. We didn't have any navaids beyond radar, Decca Navigator and DF, all of which are short range options. No sights were taken for several days, and the Old Man had a serious sweat on and kept asking me to try and get long range DF fixes at night, but groundwave transmissions of LF/MF are notoriously wobbly at night, and what fixes I got were highly unreliable.
Eventually as we approached northern Japan we picked up the Decca Navigator chain. These were highly reliable coastal navigation aids using hyperbolic relationships between signals transmitted from several transmitters in different locations. Japan had an excellent system covering their entire archipelago.
When we finally got a good position fix we found we were 20 miles out from our 'dead reckoning' position, which, given the length of the passage, is pretty good.

As far as I was concerned the worst part of that passage was the f****** fog horn going off every few minutes as my cabin was on the bridge deck next the radio shack. The bloody thing kept rattling my bones night after night. :eek:
 
Last edited:

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
This just popped up on You Tube - it appears to have ended up there as a result of a successful emergency landing, stood around for a bit and finally been repaired and flown out empty - hence leaving the wheels down for longer than normal...

The driver's comments may be something along the lines of "As long as I can see some bits of the centreline, we should be OK".

 

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
This just popped up on You Tube - it appears to have ended up there as a result of a successful emergency landing, stood around for a bit and finally been repaired and flown out empty - hence leaving the wheels down for longer than normal...

The driver's comments may be something along the lines of "As long as I can see some bits of the centreline, we should be OK".

Well, that brought up this other video of the plane being dragged back out of the trees, after a flaps-up landing at an 'airport' that had been shut for five years, resulting in no injuries, much less any fatalities.


The state of the undercarriage doors and the rather distressed original wheels and tyres, goes a long way to explaining the reluctance to pull the gear up after take-off.

The incident is reported here - https://live.warthunder.com/post/770462/en/ - and another quick look at the video above suggests that they knocked some of the dents out of the wings* before flying it out and fully repairing it. the plane going on to be one of the last 154s in service..


* They've certainly taken the sapling out of the port wingtip.
 
Last edited:

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
A couple more videos of recovering the 154, showing some of the patches where bits of trees have been removed, the state of the engines and other general damage - all repaired outdoors in (truly) Arctic conditions..

Also explaining how tight it is to get it back up out of such a small field.

And other interesting scenes, such as leaning out of the window to scrape the windscreen - plus the bloke hanging off the crane with a yard-brush and a watering can of de-icer.



The driver does look a reliable sort of chap, though.
 

Gramaisc

Forum O. G.
That's a rather old-fashioned looking thing for 1917.

If it does have any control about the roll-axis, then it's presumably via wing-warping.

The building behind looks to have had some issues with its lintels...
 

Thehooperman

Well-Known Forumite
I didn't manage to catch them on video but there were two eurofighter typhoons putting on quite a good impromptu free air display just offshore at Sheringham this morning.

I was just parking up when they flew over and then they did three or four loops in opposite directions, a steep climb and swoop down finished off with a synchronous loop the loop.

They were bloody noisey as ?#*!. as well.
 
Top